Incumbents are correct that adding evolutionary features will allow maturation of technology and public acceptance. However, you cannot use that route to get to a completely autonomous vehicle. There will almost certainly be a red area once you get to the "car only needs human attention X% of the time" phase, where X will be somewhere between 60 and 1. Once the human is allowed to tune out, they're going to and won't be able to come back fast enough in many many circumstances. Heck, that happens today when X is 100.
Once you find X, you're going to have to stop and/or back off a little on automation. You can't just keep on pushing towards 0. I presume Google has already found the X point during their program.
Google is ultimately right to be aiming at fully auto if the goal is fully auto, not just "driver assistance." There's a big area where half measures just won't work. I wager it'll take quite a lot of work to get to that goal, but it at least seems achievable. And appropriate for an entity not already "in the business".
Exactly this. The moment you make an autonomous vehicle where some period of time can be done with no driver interaction, drivers will fall asleep. What do you do when it's time to get the driver back into the action, and they don't respond?
If expressway shoulders were consistently safe to pull over upon, that would be a good approach, but they're not.
Once you find X, you're going to have to stop and/or back off a little on automation. You can't just keep on pushing towards 0. I presume Google has already found the X point during their program.
Google is ultimately right to be aiming at fully auto if the goal is fully auto, not just "driver assistance." There's a big area where half measures just won't work. I wager it'll take quite a lot of work to get to that goal, but it at least seems achievable. And appropriate for an entity not already "in the business".